Opportunistic Downlink Interference Alignment

We introduce an opportunistic downlink interference alignment (ODIA) for interference-limited cellular downlink, which intelligently combines user scheduling and downlink IA techniques. The proposed ODIA not only efficiently reduces the effect of inter-cell interference from other-cell base stations (BSs) but also eliminates intra-cell interference among spatial streams in the same cell. We show that compared to the existing downlink IA schemes, the minimum number of users required to achieve a target degrees-of-freedom (DoF) can be fundamentally reduced, i.e., the fundamental user scaling law can be improved, by using the ODIA. In addition, we introduce a limited feedback strategy in our ODIA framework, and then analyze the minimum number of feedback bits required to obtain the same performance as that of the ODIA assuming perfect feedback.